Resilia AI: The Future of Impact Intelligence & Nonprofit Capacity

By Blue Thomas, CTO @ Resilia

When I joined Resilia in January of 2020, we started with a bold vision: build technology to deploy capacity building expertise at scale across a critical mass of nonprofits. To do this, we would also have to effectively capture the resulting community impact for their relevant constituents (funders, donors, board, community).

This wasn’t going to be easy. As anyone who’s had to tell a story of impact knows, mapping outputs to outcomes to impact is anything but straightforward. There are as many interpretations as there are executive directors, program officers and nonprofit consultants out there.

Machine learning was always part of our long-term optimization plan, at a critical mass of users. But in the last couple years, the rapid emergence and accessibility of large language model (LLM) technologies has shifted our AI strategy and brought a lot of it forward.

As the hype cycle descends into a media-fueled trough of disillusionment, I figured now’s the perfect time to give a peek under the hood of Resilia’s approach to this new flavor of AI.

We are bringing AI into Resilia as a first-class citizen in 3 phases.

1. Upskilling: Strengthen your Teams

The timing of the emergence of these tools is on our side, as growth stage businesses need to shift their focus on productivity and profitability. OpenView’s 2023 SaaS benchmarks spotlight the criticality of ARR per FTE (or revenue per employee), a common efficiency metric. And with studies showing AI can amp up employee productivity by 66%, businesses can’t afford not to bring these skills into their companies.

Before we can unleash the power of AI internally and onto the social sector, we need to get our own house in order. That means:

• Honing our understanding of what AI can do (a lot), what it can’t do (more than a lot), and forging internal best practices
• Investing in tools and training so our teams aren’t left fending for themselves
• Creating spaces to innovate, share wild ideas and learn together by doing
• Eventually figure out how to measure the ROI of this work (DM me with any silver bullets!)

I tried a few ways to casually crowdsource from within to get the ball rolling on the above, but ultimately we had to be very deliberate. We gathered AI ambassadors across various teams and invested in web based training. At a logical point in training, we convened and brainstormed on how we can improve existing processes and value generating activities for our customers.

A next step for us is coordinating pilots of the most upvoted of those ideas. Pro tip: if you’re looking for budget for this, include your head of finance in these activities ;)

2. Accelerating Product Adoption: Reducing Friction with AI for UX

We are not unique in that we approach integrating LLM capabilities as a tool in our UX toolkit. Natural language is a better UI than 2 dimensional knobs and dials, and for the first time we have real, usable natural language processing (NLP) in our software toolkit. If you’re building solutions for a complicated class of problems for a mostly non technical user base, you need to prioritize reducing friction in your user experience. For this reason, two key people to bring into the upskilling phase are a product designer and a software engineer who excels at mentoring others.

First, we wanted to prioritize leveling up our product development teams, so we brainstormed AI applications to existing feature sets and chose the lowest lift, least ambiguous use case to build a proof of concept (POC). We quickly built and launched our AI Answer Bot for our Nonprofit Community.

The first POC was what we needed to go from 0 to 1 in our capabilities, and now we can prioritize based on effort & impact (and focus on value delivery for our users).

We launched an AI-assist feature for Donations Campaigns. We’re already seeing that our users who are leveraging AI assistance in crafting their campaigns are raising nearly 10% more compared to those who don’t. We have taken what we learned in those projects and upgraded our Storybuilder to enable our nonprofits to craft impact narratives by reducing the friction on getting started.

Now that we have momentum, we’re doubling down on AI across our product suite to help customers by creating:

• Accessible Capacity: Get expert answers to any question, anywhere on the platform
• Personalized Professional Development: Access to generated learning journeys and curated community spaces for your teams
• Assisted Storytelling: Easily reach your donors, community, and other audiences where they are
• Intelligent Impact Capture: Automate mapping competencies to outcomes for Executive Directors
• Intelligent Impact Reporting: Automate capturing portfolio-wide ROI for Program Officers, adherent to trust-based philanthropy principles

3. Transformation: Scaling Impact by Making Capacity Accessible

We’re not content on just streamlining existing user experiences. We often hear from our nonprofit partners that they “lack capacity to build capacity”. An Executive Director’s job, especially at a grassroots organization, has no boundaries. We aim to make capacity building expertise (of all specialties) radically accessible through technology, and leverage AI-enabled tools to spin up flywheels of work by doing the heavy lifting upfront.

If you’re an Executive Director of a nonprofit, imagine a never-offline thought partner, strategy consultant, educational consultant, note taker, communications intern, and compliance watchdog all rolled into one. This is the future of Resilia’s nonprofit technologies roadmap.

Our product strategy is to leverage AI to amplify sector expertise and improve practitioner competencies at scale. Watch this space — there’s way more to come!

Towards a Responsible, AI-Enabled Future

At Resilia, we’re invested in the use of technology and AI to accelerate impact across the social sector. Tech-for-good’s AI adoption isn’t without its challenges, from data privacy to algorithmic bias to job displacement fears. As these technologies barrel ahead, it’s on us to build safeguards and work with our partners through this transformation.

Are you interested in learning more about Resilia’s AI-enabled technology strategy? Send me a message — I’d love to connect!